Is it possible to satisfactorily commute between UC San Diego and Hillcrest using public transit?
SD traffic is not terrible–we hardly ever have anything like gridlock, and rush hour is still pretty restricted to certain times of day. If you were to live in north county and were commuting south on the 15, you might have a different opinion on that, though. Still, our traffic is orders of magnitude easier to deal with than LA’s. I used to work in La Jolla and live near Hillcrest, and I hardly hit traffic at all on my commute in either direction. I don’t know about the UCSD shuttle, but trying to do public transit from Hillcrest to the La Jolla campus would be mind-numbing. You’d probably be better off driving, but I’m not familiar with the parking situation at UCSD. If you’re going to medical school, the hospital is in Hillcrest anyway.
It looks like it’s about a 12 mile one-way trip from Hillcrest to UCSD on the freeway, and about the same distance on surface streets, mostly straight along Genesee Avenue. Here‘s the Hillcrest-La Jolla shuttle schedule. Seriously, I wonder if this commute wouldn’t be possibly perfect for a scooter or motorcycle, given San Diego’s mostly-heavenly climate and UCSD’s relatively cheap motorcycle/scooter parking permit – $66/quarter.
I commuted north on I-5N from Hillcrest right past UCSD every day for over a year and never really had any complaints. The nice part about living in Hillcrest and commuting north is that you’re reversing the commute most people face. If you were living in La Jolla and commuting into downtown SD, it would be a different story. And the I-5N commute between La Jolla and Orange County is pretty bad as I recall. I worked in Mira Mesa with folks who lived further north and they would sometimes have 2hr commutes to go 20-30 miles during rush hour.
The nice part about living in Hillcrest and commuting north is that you’re reversing the commute most people face. If you were living in La Jolla and commuting into downtown SD, it would be a different story. Actually, it’s always seemed to me that it’s really bad north of the two merges (805 and 5 near La Jolla, 15 and 163 in Miramar), since at that point there’s four freeways instead of just two. Driving against the big commute to La Jolla, I never really saw anything gnarly coming the other way.
People say that San Diego has awful traffic, but I don’t find it all the bad. The traffic is worse in North County and as you get close to the border. In between, it’s really not too bad. Of course, there is the occasional traffic snarl when there’s an accident, but it’s mostly fine. One of the beauties of San Diego is that the weather is almost never a factor in the traffic. If you really hate driving then the shuttle would work. It would also save you from hunting for parking at UCSD. Are you able to study on the shuttle? That might make the shuttle the way to commute. Personally, I’d drive it.
